A storage system includes a plurality of tape drives connected to a host, and a buffer configured to temporarily hold data read from the drives. A mechanism loads a plurality of media on which a file has been written to the plurality of drives so as to mount the plurality of media in the plurality of drives and divides the file into a plurality of data portions in an order. The mechanism determines a medium that takes the shortest time to move from a current position of a read head of a corresponding drive to a beginning position of the file and one or more media from which following data portions of the beginning data portion are to be read. The mechanism executes reading of the following data portions from the next media and temporarily holding of the read following data portions in the buffer of the storage system while reading the beginning data portion of the file from the first medium to the host.